In the past I made regularly updates of world and system but I did not update the kernel because there was no reason to reboot. Result: new software versions but an old kernel.

Some days ago i had to reboot this system which forced me to update the kernel (udev made trouble with the old kernel) with the help of a Gentoo LIVE CD.

Problem: RAID-Devices are named with changing names!
The new kernel works but the raid devices were changed from md[0,1,2] to 125,126,127 (I saw it in the LIVE CD). The system did not boot because it did not find the /dev/md[0,1,2]. Then I thought: "OK, change it in /etc/fstab and grub.conf and everything is ok". But it was not OK because after each reboot the names /dev/md125, /dev/md126, /dev/md127 changed! Example: /dev/md125 was my / partition, after the next reboot /dev/md125 was my /boot partition.

Then i made some changes (I think some mistakes, too!) and at least i disconnected the second hard drive. So I have a backup disk.

current status
My systems boots porperly (without changes raid device names) but one hard drive is missing. I'm wondering about the current names because there is a /dev/md1 instead of /dev/md125 and /dev/md0 still exists. It seems that I have a mix of old an new names

I booted the live-cd, mounted my root-device (in my case it was md3 or with the "new name" md126), copied /etc/mdadm.conf from the HDD to the live-system's /etc, unmounted md126 again. Then I executed these lines (adjusted for each of my devices):

Code:

mdadm -S /dev/md125
mdadm -A /dev/md1 --update=super-minor

And now my devices are named md1, md3,... again

Maybe this could help you with your questions #1, #3 and #4 - but I'm not 100% sure!

Good luck!

Saludos,
Andy_________________"The most dangerous world view is the world view of the ones who haven't viewed the world."
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)

No doubt everyone here already has their problems solved, but as I ran into this thread looking for answers, I figured I'd document what happened to me when I updated portage and re-emerged the system 2 days ago.